Interview with Christine Loscher, Professor of Immunology at Dublin City University

Professor of Immunology Christine Loscher is the Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Science and Health at Dublin City University (DCU). The university, founded in 1975, has 16,000 students and is spread over five locations on Dublin’s north side. The locations currently include a business incubator called DCU Invent (on the main campus), and a business accelerator called DCU Alpha, and they are all within a 2.5-kilometre (1.6 mile) radius of each other. The main campus will soon have a new state-of-the-art science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) facility called Future Tech, which is featured in The Buildings and the Deals. We caught up with Christine to chat about life sciences, real estate and innovation.

What was it like to establish the DCU COVID-19 Research & Innovation Hub in 2020?

Our mission was to solve practical problems by coordinating the university’s research across a wide spectrum (from business to life sciences to education). We addressed issues such as how to move large classrooms online; how to screen new therapeutics at speed; how to communicate public health measures effectively in a multi-lingual context. All our solutions had to be implementable within six months. The Hub's work underlines the importance of having multiple disciplines working together (something DCU is particularly good at). It also illustrates that while new research is always needed, the application of existing research has a crucial role too.